Ghost Town

Music & Lyrics : Peter Nuttall

Date Written : 5th March 1995

Album : Impressions (Released March 1995)

After 'Fear' was completed in September 1994, I wanted to take time to deconstruct some actual songs. I wanted to pull some of my favourite songs apart and 'look inside' to pick up some tips for my writing in the future. The result was 'Fear 2' which had 6 original songs and 6 covers. My favourite of which was 'I Wonder' by Gary Numan.  By January 1995, the 'Warriors' album was in my CD player being worn out so 'Rhythm of the Evening' was covered along with 'Newborn Friend' by Seal.

(I Wonder - Gary Numan)

'Poor Baby', 'Stranger in the Mirror', 'Alive' and 'Lonely' were just more of the same stuff I'd been writing for 'Fear'. My frustration at not being able to evolve the sound and the inability to come up with an album title meant that, because the album was just 'Fear 2', that became the title.

Something surreal happened March '95. I thought the days of getting your mate to ask someone out for you ended around the age of 13 but it happened to me in a Lecture at University at the age of 20. As we were packing away our books to leave, the girl sitting next to me asked me if I would 'go with' her friend (a Yorkshire expression I believe). I didn't know who she was talking about and only later found out it was someone I'd met once and never spoken to. That weird situation sparked the song 'Impressions' and the start of writing for the new album.

I'd been to my music elective at Uni, in which we had to do a live performance for 10 credits towards my yearly goal of 120. Someone decided it was a good idea to perform 'Losing my Religion' so we appropriated it with me on Piano and everyone else on xylophone, bongos, bass guitar, recorder, vocals and triangle. In the rehearsal, whilst waiting for people to set up, I started writing what became the intro to 'Ghost Town' on an out-of-tune upright piano. The kind you always saw in Primary Schools.

The biggest influence on the song however was 'Lebanon' by Human League. UK Gold, a satellite channel which I watched religiously, were showing re-runs of Top of the Pops. The song had passed me by in the 80s, probably didn't get much radio airplay, and this was my first listen. I went straight to the keyboard and added a chorus to the verse I'd written earlier that day. In fact you can hear 'Where are we when (we all fall down)' in 'And who will have won when the soldiers have gone'.

The lyric essentially is about two things.  The first is empty pages in diaries. I always tried to keep a diary in the past but between the many blank days were things like 'Played footy' and 'got fish and chips'. Looking back at the diaries I kept between 1990 - 1994, I had some special memories but most of them were fading because the diary pages were blank. Like they'd never happened. Like dreams - you're so involved until you wake up and it takes you a few minutes before its all gone. You bring experience with you and sometimes a friend will remind you of something that happened but mostly, the small things that made you smile are gone. 'Forgotten most of our yesterdays' and 'Empty hands bring the past back to me' underline this sentiment.

'Sorry but I forgot your name, I called for you but no one came' is also quite a heartbreaking line - knowing that all the people I was close to at the time would move away, get married, have kids, get jobs - basically, the freedom of late teens (having just turned 20) would soon be a Ghost Town. A comment on the bottom of the lyric said 'I am my own Ghost Town' but I'm not sure if I meant that or I was trying to be pretentious.

During this delve behind 'Ghost Town', I found a skeleton lyric scrawled on the back of 'Alive' which was on 'Fear 2'. You can see below that instead of 'Where are we when we all fall down', it reads 'Face to Face when we all fall down'. 'Face to Face' was a song on Gary Numan's 'Warriors' album which I now realise was a bigger influence on 'Ghost Town' than Lebanon was.